PW02 - Bidding on Death (5 page)

It was getting pretty late when the phone rang. Too late for telemarketers, was one of the kids in some kind of jam?

No, it was Julia. “Cissy,” she gasped, “someone broke in!”

THREE

“Oh my God,” I gasped,  “are you all right?! Did you call the police?”

Julia took a deep breath, audible over the phone line. “Sorry,” she said. “Let me calm down or I’ll get you wound up. I just realized that sounded worse than it is.”

“So what happened?”

“I was just locking up for the night, and the front door lock has been broken. It must have happened while I was out, because neither Bob nor I heard anything this evening. When I came back from your place I went in the back, so I just now noticed.”

A rumble in the background, and Julia added, “Bob is telling me to get off the phone. I called the sheriff’s department right before I called you, and they’ll be here soon. Bob wants us to look around, see what’s missing. I’ll call you tomorrow, unless there are big developments. So consider no news to be good news.”

“Okay,” I said. “Keep me posted. And stay safe.”

Julia didn’t call again that night, so after breakfast the next day, Polly and I walked over to her place.
I knocked on the back
door and got no answer, so I opened it, stuck my head in and hollared “Knock knock.”

“Come on in,” Julia hollared back from the front of the house.

I entered their great room and Polly trotted over to greet Beau. Julia was sitting at her built-in desk. The office area
was even more of a disaster zone
than usual. But on closer inspection, I realized that was due to a new wave of boxes, which comprised Julia’s auction haul. Julia was going through the boxes, unwrapping her purchases and setting them out in a line along the wall.

“So what’s the verdict?” I asked. “What did they get?”

Julia waved comprehensively. “Who knows? I can’t find anything missing.”

I pulled up a chair. “What did the police say?”

“Luther Dawson came by last night. Took some notes but didn’t sound very hopeful. I’m supposed to make a list of missing items for the police report and insurance, but like I say, I’m not finding anything. The computer’s still here, the TV’s still over there. My jewelry box is on the dresser upstairs and it wasn’t touched. It’s all costume jewelry anyway. My cards were in my purse with me.”

Julia unwrapped a cookie jar and admired it briefly before adding it to the row.
“Luther thinks it was one of our criminal element, looking for cash or small items. He said someone, naming no names, is just out of juvie. I know who he’s talking about – Bink Tyler. I could tell Luther had already decided that Bink is the perp, but without finding goods on him, there wasn’t a lot they could do.”

“Cash?” I asked. “Who uses cash anymore?”

“Huh!” said Julia. “Good question. Well, I guess drug dealers and criminals. I can’t remember the last time
I paid cash for anything.
”

“Then it would have been dumb of this Bink Tyler to expect to find cash at your place,” I pointed out.

“Aren’t most criminals dumb, though?”

“I suppose so.”

Polly ambled over to see what we were up to, and Beau followed to sniff her butt. He was uninterested in the boxes, presumably having thoroughly sniffed them when they arrived.

“Hey!” I asked. “What about Beau? Did he react at all?”

“Oh, Beau,” Julia said disparagingly. “Not that he’s exactly a watch dog, but he wasn’t here. Bob went down to Buddy’
s
and you know how long those outings take, and he took Beau with him.”

I knew. Buddy’s Feed and Seed was the favorite hangout of the
men of a certain age in Queen Anne County. There were always a few ‘customers’ sitting in the back passing the time of day, and more often or not there was a dog in the mix. Visitors from more urban settings found the scene just too adorably quaint for words.

Just then
the
front
door opened, and Julia jumped like she’d been stung. “Oh, it’s you!” she exclaimed, as Bob entered carrying a bag.

“Who else would it be?” Bob asked her curiously.

“Oh, I know,” she told him. “I’m just flustered. We’ve never had a break-in before.”

Bob nodded. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Queen Anne is having a crime wave.” He set the bag down on the work counter and pulled out his purchases, which turned out to be new door hardware. “
I was just out to the h
ardware place in Livery and Jordan
Johnston was there buying new locks too. He said Amy’s place had been broken into.”

“Jordan
is Amy’s boyfriend,” Julia told me in an aside.

“You mean the Amy we met at the auction?” I asked, just to be sure.

“That’s the one,” Julia said.

“Oh no!” I exclaimed. “Did they get the Ruba Rombic?”

“Get the what?” Bob asked.

“There were some glasses and vases and such that Amy got at the auction,” I told him. “They’re really valuable, though you’d never know to look at them.”

“Jordan
didn’t say,” Bob replied. He was extracting the door hardware from the almost inpenetrable packaging as we talked. Finally freeing his purchase, he hoisted a screwdriver and hunkered down by the front door.

Julia heaved out of her desk chair. “Come on, Cissy,” she said, heading for the kitchen. “Let’s get away from this mess for a while. I want to call Amy.”

We settled into the kitchen with fres
h cups of coffee, and Julia dia
led and then joined me at the table. The kitchen phone has an extra long cord for just these types of occasions.

“Amy? It’s Julia,” she told the phone. “We just heard about the break-in! Hon, what happened?”

She paused to listen, while I wished she had a speaker phone. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. When? Uh-huh. Where were you? I see…”

I joggled her elbow. “Ask her about the Ruba Rombic.”

“Oh, that was Cissy,” Julia told the phone. “Yeah, she’s right here. She wants to know if they got the Ruba Rombic. Uh-huh. Well, that’s good.”

After a few more minutes of a conversation that I could only hear half of, Julia ended the conversation and turned back to me. “Amy says her place was broken into, but she’s not sure when. She went home from your place and just had time to shower, dr
ess, and do her face before Jordan
came to take her out to dinner at Washington House. She just got home this morning. She kind of danced around that; I guess she thinks we’re too old to know that adults often spend the night together these days. So far she hasn’t found anything missing. It’s weird, isn’t it?”

“Weird, I’ll say. I wonder how many more homes will get hit?”

But in the next few days, it became clear that the crime wave was over. No one else reported a break-in, so it was just the two. And nothing seemed to be missing at either location.

Wednesday, Amy came over to my place with Julia. We were going to scout around the attic and storage for more of what Amy called ‘eBuyables’.

The search was fruitful. My old Barbies and the plastic horses I played with as a child made the cut. “How much are they worth?” I asked Amy.

“I can’t really say,” Amy admitted. “Both Bar
bie and Breyer horses are real
specialty fields. Some of them are worth almost nothing, and some are worth a whole heck of a lot. I’d suggest you list them all, start low, and see what happens. Trust me, the collectors will find the valuable ones.”

We found a children’s tea set that must have belonged to Jack’s parents. Amy went into raptures over it. “Akro Agate, in the original box!” she exclaimed.
I’d learned by now that the original box always increased the value of an item.
Reverently, she opened the box
to inspect the contents. “And it’s lemonade and oxblood!”

“That’s good?” I asked, just to be sure.

“That’s great!” she assured me.

I picked up a tiny tea pot
, which was opaque pale yellow streaked with dark red
. “Hey, this is glass!”

“Sure. Akro Agate was a glass company,” Amy explained. “They started out making marbles, then branched out into flower pots and vases. Back in the 30s, children’s toy dishe
s were almost all
Japan
ese ceramic
, but World War II put an end to imports from Japan for the duration, and Akro Agate started making toy dishes in glass. They’re highly collectible now.
And es
pecially in this color – lemonade and oxblood.
”

I removed a cup and saucer from their slots and put them together.  Amy looked over the set. “You’ve got everything here,” she said. “The complete set. Look over each piece for chips or cracks – if you don’t find anything, you can list this little gem as Mint In Box.”

“Ooh,” Julia squealed, “look at the darling little creamer!” She took it out and mimed pouring cream into the tiny cup.

We played with the tea set for a while and
then hauled our finds down to the kitchen. Over coffee, we
chatted about local news. “Nothing new on the break
-
ins?” I asked.

“No,” said Julia with a disgruntled frown. “It sounds like Luther is at a dead end.”

“Same here,” said Amy.

“It’s weird,” I mused. “Why you two? Amy, you don’t live anywhere near here do you? Seems like if it was random, the fellow would just hit a bunch of places in a row.”

“I’m on the other side of the county,” Amy said. “And none of my neighbors reported break
-
ins.”

“So let’s think about this,” I suggested. “What do you two have in common?”

They pondered the question for a moment. “We both go to the Episcopal Church,” Julia offered.

“We’re friends,” suggested Amy. “Maybe we both pi-
…
ticked off the same person.”

Julia leaned over and patted her hand. “Hon, I know I’m not young,” she said. “But when younger people censor their language around me, it makes me feel a thousand years old.”

Amy grinned. “Sorry.” After a pause she added, “We’re both in the Tuesday night book club.”

Book clubs didn’t sound like a promising motive to me.
Then I suggested, “You both went to the estate auction last weekend.”

Julia and Amy exchanged looks. “So did you,” Julia reminded me. “So did a lot of people.”

But I felt
this was a fruitful line of thought. “Yeah, but you two bought a lot. I wonder… maybe there was something in all those boxes that turned out to be valuable.”

“Well, sure,” Amy said. “The Ruba Rombic is valuable and it wasn’t touched.”

“Maybe something else?” I hazarded.

“Anyway,” Julia added, “the person with the real haul from that auction was Rose. If that was the motive for the break
-
ins, why wasn’t she hit?”

“Hmm. Are we sure she wasn’t?” I asked.

“Well, we’re sure she didn’t report it to the Sheriff’s Department if she was,” said Julia practically. “Otherwise it would be all over the county.”

I drummed my fingers on the table. “That’s if she reported it.”

“Why wouldn’t she report it?” Amy wanted to know.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But hey, why don’t we ask her? If she didn’t have a break-in, then the auction probably wasn’t the motive.”

Both Julia and Amy just looked at me. Undaunted, I pulled out the phone book, which in Queen Anne County is more of a pamphlet than the doorstop of urban environs.
I found an R. Jackson listed, with an address on Washington Ave. I pulled the phone down from the wall.

“Really, Cissy?” Julia asked. “What are you going to say?”

“I’
m just going to ask if
she’s had a break-in.”

They were both still staring at me as if I’d flapped my arms and started flying around the room.

“Look,” I said in exasperation. “I know she’s rude and hard to deal with, but what can she do to me over the phone? And it’s not like if she got angry she could retaliate with some government power of hers; she has none anymore.”

Resolutely, I dia
led the number. Anticlimactic
al
ly, a machine answered. “You’ve reached the Jackson residence,” the voice said. “I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you leave a name and number…” and so on.

I’ve given in to having an answering machine, but I still hate talking to other people’s. I cleared my throat and, feeling foolish, said, “Rose? This is Cissy Rayburn? From the Passatonnack Winery?” I was making every sentence sound like a question. I tried to speak more confidently, difficult with my skeptical audience. “I don’t know if you recall, but we met at the auction a few days ago. The reason I’m calling is because several of my friends who were at the auction had their houses broken into. I was wondering if you’d experienced a break-in as well.”